Shona Sculpture'
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The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals. This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. Zambezia (1993), XX (H). THE MYTH OF 'SHONA SCULPTURE' CAROLE PEARCE Abstract 'Shona sculpture' has always relied heavily for its commercial success on its supposed authenticity and autonomy. However, the genre is neither rooted in the spontaneous expression of traditional Black spirituality, nor is it an autonomous contemporary Black art form. The sculpture is easily explained as a deliberate product of the modernist tastes of White expatriates during the 1950s and 1960s and, in particular, those of the first Director of the National Gallery. THIS ARTICLE ARISES from reflections on the way in which, over time, views originally thought to be daringly radical and avant-garde become incorporated into the general stream of thought. Here their brilliant lustre fades and they congeal into the solid rock of the commonplace. The myth of 'Shona sculpture' is an illustration of this process. Thirty years ago the notion of a serious, non-functional and non- ritualistic contemporary Black art would have been given little popular credence. During that time, however, 'Shona sculpture' has earned itself a secure niche in the art galleries and markets of the developed world and is collected on a large scale, exported by the tonne by galleries and private dealers, exhibited in universities, museums, galleries and parks in the West and is the subject of numerous journal articles and a few monographs. It has been the making of some reputations and a few fortunes. The extraordinary success of 'Shona sculpture' both as a commodity and as an aesthetic object derives in large part, although not entirely, from its supposed authenticity, its rooted connection with African modes of thought, and in its African aesthetic. Some commentators, for example, hint at a connection between 'Shona sculpture' and the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe1 produced some four centuries ago. Most writers point to the spontaneous flowering, ex nihilo, of stone carving skills of Shona artists: it is the spontaneity of this renaissance which is the source of wonder. Many critics emphasize the artists' lack of training and models to drive home the message of natural, untutored, authentic skill. Those who admit that labels like 'Shona' are inaccurate2 and that the sculpture does not represent specifically Shona culture are still determined to affirm that 1 Arnold, for example, devotes the first two chapters of her thesis on Zimbabwean stone sculpture to a discussion of the soapstone birds of Great Zimbabwe as 'the only extant examples of large-scale, early Shona sculpture'; see M. Arnold, Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture (Bulawayo, Books of Zimbabwe, 1981), 1. 2 Many of the artists are not Shona speakers. Some are Ndebele; others are migrant labourers from neighbouring countries, especially Malawi and Mozambique. 85 86 THE MYTH OF SHONA SCULPTURE it expresses Black culture and, in terms of content and technique, is therefore authentically indigenous. But it is my contention that 'Shona sculpture' owes its origin, form and content to the then avant-garde aesthetic sensibilities of an Englishman: it was and is a wholly European, modernist art form taken over and used by Black artists for their own ends. This article attempts to show how the tenacious myth of authenticity became established as a commonplace truth, and to expose the reality lying beneath it. SHONA SCULPTURE The force behind the generation of 'Shona sculpture' was Frank McEwen, the charismatic, iconoclastic Director of the Rhodesia National Gallery from 1957 to 1973. McEwen had trained in Paris in the 1930s. His parents were art collectors and dealers and had introduced him, at an early age, to West African art. As a young man he numbered leading artists and sculptors of the Ecole de Paris3 among his friends. His early exposure to art was radical: a classical art history background combined with personal acquaintance with some of the great, revolutionary modernists, in a city which was the virtual birthplace of modernism. He shared with other modernists an appreciation of African art, together with some of their misconceptions4 regarding this genre. His education in art naturally inclined him towards the avant-garde, early modernism and, in the context of Rhodesia, African art. McEwen's goal was to promote a completely new African art form, thereby disdaining the work produced by Black craftsmen for tourists, which McEwen scornfully labelled 'airport art', and the small but extant 'petty bourgeois' White art. This naturally set him at odds with the ruling class: lightly educated White fanners, industrialists and civil servants. The Gallery milieu, the glamorous, upper-middle class, mainly English group of connoisseurs, shared his aesthetic, and his political opposition to the lower-middle and working-class government of Ian Smith. Nevertheless, both White groups shared fundamental assumptions about African tradition and culture. These Included the idea that Africans were somehow more authentic and closer to nature than Whites. They also believed that the less educated and less urban were Africans, the more they were in harmony with nature and primeval forces; the deeper and more compelling their religious beliefs and the more binding their 3 O. Sultan, Life in Stone (Harare, Baobab Books, [1992]), 2. 4 For the misconceptions, see Robblns on Kandlnsky's notions of 'spiritual affinity' In W. Robblns and N. Nooter, African Art in American Collections: Survey 1989 (Washington DC Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 38. CAROLE PEARCE 87 social structure.5 But if crass White Rhodesians thought that Africans were primitive and therefore ignorant, McEwen thought they were primitive6 and, therefore, closer to the well-springs of creativity than trained artists. The Director of the National Gallery was well placed to kill two conservative birds with one stone: in promoting a Black gallery art he could expect aesthetic reward7 while at the same time subjecting White political and cultural backwardness to indirect, although painful, critique. According to Sultan, McEwen began his curatorship by 'travelling throughout the country getting to know what he could about its folklore and traditions'.8 This ethnographic adventure might seem surprising in an art director. It was, nevertheless, completely in harmony with the foundational components of the 'Shona sculpture' myth. McEwen supported Jungian theories of the relationship between 'primitive minds' and art.9 These assumed the existence of a 'collective unconscious'. 'Primitive man', left to his own unschooled talents, is able to grasp and communicate universal themes through the medium of art. Universal themes expressed by untutored minds emerge from traditional folk-tales, spiritual and religious beliefs; that is to say, from the realm of the sacred rather than the secular. McEwen's quest was, therefore, typical of avant-garde of the time, seeking in 'primitive' art documentary evidence for cognitive and ethnographic concerns.10 It was based as much on a popular theory of human nature and the human mind as on aesthetic considerations. In an early description of the Workshop School art (now called 'Shona sculpture1) McEwen says: One of the strangest inexplicable features occurs in the early stages of develop- ment through which many of the artists pass, when they appear to reflect concep- tually and even symbolically, but not stylistically, the art of ancient civilizations, mainly pre-Colombian. We refer to it as their 'Mexican period' which evolves finally into a highly individualistic style.11 5 For example, Paterson 'felt the rural African's life "more complete" than ours' (i.e. than urban Whites); D. Walker, Paterson ofCyrene (Harare, Mambo Press, 1985), 55. 6 Although McEwen avoids the term 'primitive', he Is happy to describe the work as 'adult child art', R. Guthrie (ed.), Prominent Sculptors of Zimbabwe: Nicholas Mukomberanwa (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1989), 6. 7 Beier reports that McEwen was determined to try 'to create new artists in the cultural desert of Rhodesia', quoted in F. Willett, African Art (London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1971), 256. 8 Sultan, Life in Stone, 5. 9 See, for example, Sultan, ibid., 3. 10 Considering that McEwen was of necessity working with contemporary people, one implication of this thesis is that contemporary Africans possess 'primitive' minds. 11 F. McEwen, 77K African Workshop School (Rhodesia National Gallery, Salisbury, [1968]), 1. 88 THE MYTH OF SHONA SCULPTURE These founding ideas have struck deep roots and many flourishing shoots have sprung from them. These ideas can be traced in the choice of artists, the type of training they received, the content and the form of the art works they produced. They can be found in all kinds of developments for which McEwen was not directly responsible, but for which they proved the groundwork: the Tengenenge school,12 the romantic religiosity imputed to the work, the development of a mass export market in 'Shona sculpture', its use as a symbol of Black creativity, its symbolic political force, and its economic success. Here I shall deal only with the first four aspects. SELECTION The artists were initially all men and were drawn from the rural or uneducated urban working class.13 It is still the case that most Black Zimbabwean artists, unlike their counterparts in the West, are men from rural or semi-rural backgrounds14 with little formal education. The first to be handed paints and paper were Gallery attendants.15 They were followed by friends or relatives of the initial group, that is, either relatives or people from the same area, such as the Nyanga craftsmen known to Jorum Mariga. They were thus partly self-selected and partly chosen at random from a particular socio-economic group.